From Euphoria to Suicide

Finally home after nearly eight years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, Air Force Captain Edward Alan Brudno beamed joyously as he stepped from a plane in Massachusetts and hugged his wife close. "Words like unbelievable, exciting and unreal perfectly describe the fantastic excitement of being reborn," he exulted. That was 16 weeks ago. A month later Brudno's mood had changed. "I knew the initial euphoria would pass, and it has," he confided to the wife of a fellow P.O.W. "I'm feeling pretty depressed these days." Brudno's despair deepened, and last week he ended his life with an overdose of sleeping pills. Before he died, he wrote, in French, "My life is no longer worth living."

Brudno's death tragically confirmed the warnings sounded by psychiatrists before release of the prisoners. They had predicted that many men might return emotionally scarred for life (TIME, Feb. 19). Los Angeles Psychoanalyst Helen Tausend had said that captivity may leave a P.O.W. "only the shell of a man," and Yale Psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton had suggested that the war's unpopularity would lead many prisoners to conclude that their suffering had been in vain. Something like this may have happened to Brudno. Like all suicides, Brudno's act must have had many causes, some predating the war. "There was no specific thing that caused his depression," says his brother Robert. But both he and his wife Deborah had changed in subtle ways, and he soon discovered that Deborah and her parents had been active against the war to which he had been so deeply committed.

Brudno's suicide came two days after Pentagon Health Chief Richard Wilbur announced that all former Viet Nam prisoners would be counseled for five years. The Government's goal: to prevent the violent deaths common among American servicemen who survived imprisonment in the Far East during World War II and the Korean War. According to Wilbur, these men "did badly" after their release. Of the deaths that occurred in the group from 1945 to 1954,40% resulted from murder, suicide or accident. As for Viet Nam prisoners, all have suffered from a transient "stress reaction" (euphoria, fear or depression), and most are having difficulty "moving back into a family."

Learning of Brudno's death, one psychiatrist bluntly predicted that other suicides were likely. Hoping to head off that possibility, the Air Force set about learning everything it could about Brudno. The son of James Brudno, a Quincy, Mass., physician, Alan was an introverted boy with few friends. He earned a degree in aeronautical engineering at M.I.T. and dreamed of becoming an astronaut. A few months before he shipped out to Viet Nam, he married Deborah Gitenstein of Harrison, N.Y. Eight days before he was due to return to the U.S., he was shot down. "They kept him alone in a tiny cell without even a cot," his father told TIME last week. "He had to sleep on a hard stone floor. In the mornings they'd serve him some gruel or pumpkin soup." Nevertheless, he mustered enough energy to study French and, according to Air Force Lieut. Colonel Kenneth North, imprisoned in a cell adjoining Brudno's, he seemed "in solid shape."